when he saw her stand on tiptoe before a picture or look longingly at a bit of bronze; conscious the while that there was an artistic and luxurious side to the child’s nature that he did not gratify—­with which, indeed, he had little sympathy—­and evidence of which it often vexed him to observe, as if it were a barrier between them, when her rapt face revealed feelings unknown to him as she looked into the sunset; as she stood at the door on summer nights while bell-notes and flower-scents went by on the wind; as she listened to orchestral music which in his ears was a noisy snarl.  But, for all that, he said to himself that this ideal intelligence, so to call it, of Lilian’s, was something higher than his own rude senses; he had no wish to place her on a lower level; he must do away the barrier by surmounting it himself; and he used his leisure time to study pictures and music, to discover the entrance to this world of art whose atmosphere he fancied to be Lilian’s native air; and already he began to be able to translate into ideas the strange and awful thrill he felt before some great white marble where genius and inspiration had wrought together, and to find the thread by which he might one day follow the vast windings of those symphonies which Lilian always grew so pale to hear.  But he was a person of singular reserves, and Lilian learned nothing of such effort or accomplishment as yet.  “You think I am so perfect!” she would say.  “You have built up a great hollow idol around me, and it is like living in a vacuum.  Don’t you know it is very tiresome to be chained up to such a standard?” And John only adored her all the more for her candor, did not believe it, and hastened home from business the sooner.

In fact, if this home, in which they all shared, was not exactly as they would have liked it to be, it was nevertheless a delightful place to John Sterling.  He already had a sense of proprietorship in it.  He lined its walls with books as he grew able, with prints, with now and then a painting, with plaster till he could get marble; Lilian’s ivies clambered everywhere, and her azaleas and great lilies seemed to have a secret of perpetual flowering; a bright fire cast rosy lights and shadows over it all; and John would declare, as he sank into his easy-chair in the half twilight and surveyed the warm place, which seemed only a ruddy background for Lilian’s fairness, that he never wanted anything better than this as long as he lived.  It hurt him sometimes, though, to remember that Lilian never made any response to such words.  “Well, well,” he would say to himself in a way he had, “why should she? and why should I expect it of her?  If people are born with wings, they do not want to creep.  She beautifies everything she touches, and she is only in her right place when all the flower of the world’s beauty is about her.  But some day that shall be; and meantime there is nothing to hinder my liking this.”  He had almost an ideal home with Lilian’s mother, as he wrote to his